Abstract
Neuroscientists who are interested in language and linguists, psychologists, and philosophers who are interested in the brain all deal with the relations that exist between mind and language. Two fundamental postulates of modern neurolinguistics are (1) that brain-language relationships are determined by a genetic program specific to the human species (Broca, 1865), and (2) that this innate genetic predisposition produces a functional lateralization in the governing of linguistic behavior (Broca, 1863, 1865; Dax, 1836, 1865). Specifically, except among some ambidextrous and left-handed individuals, there is usually a dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere. The first of these postulates has been derived from studies of the cerebral cortex during gestation, and the second from the clinical observation that aphasia frequently occurs following lesions to the left hemisphere, but almost never following lesions to the right. Each of these points merits a moment of reflection.
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Lecours, A.R., Mehler, J., Parente, MA., Vadeboncoeur, A. (1988). Literacy and the Brain. In: de Kerckhove, D., Lumsden, C.J. (eds) The Alphabet and the Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_16
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